Ok, our work on features for Firebug 1.5b1 is complete! We pass all of our tests on Firefox 3.5.4; one test fails on Firefox 3.6b and Firefox 3.7a. That test covers one of our new breakpoint features and we’ll need to work with Firefox team to fix it.

Special Thanks! to Mike Sabine Radcliffe for new enhancements to the inspector and an impressive investigation of and solution to inspector bugs. The 1.5 inspector is very solid.

Now we are looking for user feedback and bug reports. We expect to have about six to eight weeks to fix bugs in 1.5. Once Firefox 3.6 ships we will pretty much end work on 1.5 except for a few tweaks or fixes. So now is the time to try 1.5 on your web site and let us know.

We made a big push at the end here so I’ll cover the the changes since 1.5a26 first, then in a later post we’ll go over the new features in detail.

Locale is-IS, Icelandic (Iceland), contribution by Kristjan

vi-VN locale (contribution by loveleeyoungae)

Issue 2371: Placement of numbers indicating offset/margin/border/padding prevents display of more than 3 digits in the value

getfirebug.com has Chromebug 1.5a4. Chromebug is the Firebug code adapted for XUL applications. It is the debugger that Firebug developers use to develop Firebug. Note: you must install Firebug 1.5 as well as the Chromebug XPI. .

If you have looked any previous released version of Chromebug you will see a lot of changes. Some of these are inherited from Firebug. Others are improvements in Chromebug itself.

The key features that we use routinely and that work well:

Inspect over Firefox. Probably also works on Thunderbird.

Viewing XUL and HTML, CSS styles, Layout and the DOM properties all work well.

Javascript debugging. Seems pretty good now, the only problem is when I breakpoint Firebug and then try to use the breakpoints in Firebug. Since they share the same core debug engine, the result is often that Chromebug fails to break.

Error tracking in the Trace panel.

The command line works for some commands at least (not something I use however)

It is also a fun tool for poking around under the covers:

Try setting the context: to noWindow://BackstagePass and looking at the DOM panel

The XUL Windows panel shows the output of the window mediator

Filter: menu attempts to organize the chrome namespace (but I don’t use it after all)

File: menu shows all the files Chromebug knows about (well just the JS files now).

Tools > Open Chromebug Trace Console, if you want to know how to debug a debugger for debuggers 😉

We don’t use Console or Net panel, so we don’t know if the work or not.

Tools > Platform shows the components, but it is very slow then crashes Firefox.

Some features under Tools have rotted but have not been removed.

The source code looks like it was written by someone who did not understand XUL applications and did not have a lot of documentation for some of the APIs. (But its getting a lot better as the causes improve).

Finally Gerv helped set up a newsgroup, mozilla.addons.chromebug. I welcome suggestions and comments there.

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.5X.0a26, the last alpha release of Firebug 1.5. It passes all of our tests on Firefox 3.5.4 and Firefox 3.6b1 as of Oct 9. (On FF 3.7 we’re not so good, but we found several bugs in Firefox and Firebug).

Our work on adding features is done and our next release will be 1.5b1.